Scheduling of Flexible Manufacturing Systems Using Rule Base

Abstract

This paper deals with a scheduling problem of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) based on a knowledge engineering approach. To cope with the computational complexity of scheduling problems we apply a simulation method using a timed Petri net, where FMS is modelled as a discrete event system. When some part types can be processed in a machine, a priority rule is applied to select one part type to be processed. For obtaining an efficient schedule of FMS we construct a rule base to generate an appropriate priority rule in our simulation process.